I'D RESPECT HIS WISDOM MORE IF HE USED SCENTED MARKERS

RALPH RECORDS - DAMN DID THEY ANNOY MOST EVERYONE I KNEW

Teenagers are incredibly conformist, don't let anyone fool you.  This label KICKED ASS back in the day, but you wouldn't have known that in Owego, NY.......

LOCAL PROPHET

Dude comes out of hibernation at the end of summer.  Still gets his supplies at Dawn's store down on Harrison.

Posts a lot of anti-drug and anti-child abuse stuff, most of it around the schools and then up and down the main bus line thru town.  I don't know if he's bilingual or if someone else is taking a cue from him, but a lot of Spanish language signs are popping up, too.

This guy added anti-women's rights to his arsenal about a year ago.  What can you say about it?  65 year old men making laws about women's bodies while letting male rapists off with light sentences seems like a pretty fair sized amount of bullshit.  Bottom line, if you have a dick, you don't really have much say on a woman's choice about her body.  Best thing a guy can do if abortion is a topic that keeps him up at night is to never have intercourse with a woman again.  BOOM!  No worries.....

I know a certain percentage of these politicians keep getting busted trying to solicit gay sex in bathrooms, so there's another solution for you.  It's good to have options other than passing fascist laws based on religious beliefs, which I'm pretty sure are supposed to be kept separate from gov't issues in the first place.  If churches don't pay taxes, then god can keep his/her big fat yap shut.

But I digress.....

The thing about a lot of these abortion signs  (80% of them, at least) is that they're posted in front of or around my credit union.  I'm not sure if this is part of the dude's message, or just a convenience thing.  I've checked the brochures the credit union people send out, abortions don't seem to be listed in the services they provide.

The guy that was selling mixed drinks out of his house this summer (only $7 a pop!) put a few of HIS signs up in front of a couple of local churches.  Location location location. 

I'm thinking I need to start posting my poems on phone poles, too......

STUPID PEOPLE MAKE THE WORLD GO 'ROUND

Couple next door fights all the time.  He seems to be an unemployed pothead, she works but is always getting accused of fucking around on the guy.  He also seems to greatly resent having to stay home and watch the kids while she works when he'd rather be out hanging w/ his dipshit dope buddies.  Or his girlfriend, but his infidelity doesn't seem to be as big an issue as hers.

They took their fight last night from the apartment to the street (so as not to wake the kiddies), then into their car so me and Dawn couldn't get some free entertainment.  Fuckers....  

Apparently, he claimed to have video proof of her with other people and her pants down.  Keep your eyes peeled on YouTube, it sounds interesting. 

At some point, he gets out of the SUV for a smoke and she locks the door behind him, leaving him to stand in the street banging on the window with his bare hand, threatening to mess her up if she doesn't unlock that goddamn door, etc etc.  Kept telling her he was going to kick the window in, then kick the shit out of her, then he'd scream "Unlock this goddamn door now!", which seems like a bad approach.  If you're going to ask someone to open a door, don't threaten to kill them BEFORE you make this request, you know? 

I had the phone ready to call the cops, and my trusty baseball bat in case he needed to be subdued before the cops showed up, but I was kind of interested to see him try to break the window with only his hands and feet.  Sadly, it never happened.  I think he needed to toke up, he sounded like he was losing interest in the whole thing, and then the woman across the street came home and, while the guy was distracted watching her pull into her driveway, the pantsless partier slipped out the passenger door and back into the apartment.

Who needs cable tv with neighbors like these?

BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE

Their new album is out and, although it's pretty good, I gotta say it sounds like they're getting a little lazy.  They've been on a creative hot streak since Sgt. Pepper, mixing up their sound, adding some post punk and some Krautrock noise to the stew, but this one seems to have a lot of slow, unfocused meandering passages like the old Mental Illness and Take it from the Man! days.  Not necessarily bad, but the songs all seemed to run together back then, just one big long stoner dirge with whiny vocals.  Still, 20+ years of pretty solid awesomeness is nothing to take lightly, I guess.

WALMART - BECAUSE WE KNOW WHAT GOOD AMERICANS LIKE

So, I can buy t-shirts and hats there that promote and encourage alcohol consumption, and I can but lots of guns and bows & arrows for after I've consumed my alcohol, but my copy of IN UTERO had to have the title of Rape Me changed on the back cover, because WalMart didn't want to hurt anyone.

I wonder if the Walton brood buys their politicians in bulk, or if they grow them locally?

Spouting off like the god damn pseudo-intellectual that I am.....

Just re-read The Choirboys.  Heavy shit.  Coal black humor, and it all ends in tragedy.  Very dark stuff and a whole lot of vicious attacks on the incompetence of the higher-ups in the LAPD back in '75.  Biggest problem with this book is that it was Wambaugh's peak.  Lines and Shadows came close,  but I'd pretty much given upon the guy by The Golden Orange.  Cookie cutter plots & characters, a recurring cast of smart streetwise cops who seemed to be able to do everything but straighten out their own fucked up lives,  The Law of Diminishing Returns had definitely set in.

Decided to give him another try after getting into The Choirboys again.  Reading Hollywood Crows, from '98 I think.  Not horrible, but it still seems to be an auto-pilot novel.  One of the biggest problems is that Wambaugh loves to stick real-life vignettes and anecdotes into his novels, and a lot of these really have nothing to do with the main thrust of the story.  Basically, they're padding.  Around page 75, I had to go back and re-read the book flap to see what the hell the actual plot was, because we really hadn't seemed to have gotten there yet.    I'm at page 250 now, the plot's finally chugging along, not as many anecdotes, but not much of a story to justify 325+ pages.  Probably could've whittled it down to 200 pages without losing anything. 

The biggest offender in the anecdote category is the one where the immensely overweight drunken homeless guy in a filthy, blood-spattered basement staggers and sits on a stillborn child, crushing the corpse just so the event can be used as a setup for a punchline for a callous cop.  Tommy Rivers was a doomed child in The Choirboys whose death helped set some later events in motion, and I don't recall any jokes being made about his torture, rape and abuse before he died.  This story seems like it was thrown in in case a movie option is tossed out there, some of that tasteless grossout Tom Green/Jenny McCarthey that the kids (the fucking idiot ones) love these days.

Anyhoo.....

There's some other little kvetchy parts along the way, and I think I can pretty much see how it's all going to end, but I'll finish it up, then get back into re-reading Berger's Sneaky People.  I like to keep a few going at once.  Have some Cirino and Wakoski poetry collections that I'm moving thru, too, and a book on Russian outsider/non-conformist art.  Maybe an old Robert B Parker Spenser novel after that to cleanse the palate.....

The avenues, all lined with trees

Probably one of the most rejected poems I have, possibly one of the most rejected you'll ever read.  Woo hoo!



Approaching midnight, heat of the day still everywhere, still
stuck to everything, caught in the trees, filling these rooms,
objects pushed aside, broken, music drowned out. This is the
moment. This is the here, the now, and it really doesn’t
matter how many soldiers will die in the war. It really doesn’t
matter what war it is we’re talking about, or how many
civilians will be raped, beheaded, lined up along bloodstained
walls and machine-gunned down. The wheels are in motion.

The men you’ve elected have their orders. You will die old and
alone. Without ceremony, but this is moving too far ahead.
Quarter after midnight, rumble of thunder, distant lightning,
still no rain. Mortgage due, phone bill due, numbers never
adding up in the checkbook the way they should. Hands of
Christ caught in the whirling blades. No need for Judas. No
need for the cross. The rest of your life will be punishment enough
for whatever it is you’re guilty of. No one ever really believes in
                                                    hope until it’s too late to matter.

MOGWAI!!

Just....  Mogwai.  Y'know?  If I have to explain it, then we probably can't be friends anymore.

To quote myself - "Fucking Amazon...."

Just bought a nifty new pork pie hat.  It was cheap, wasn't expecting high fashion, but I also wasn't expecting a hat stuffed into a plastic bag and then shipped from China.  Needless to say, it arrived a little worse for the wear. 

Filed for a return & refund, got my email from the seller with a link where I could go to print out the "return materials".  Essentially, a clip-out postcard to stick onto the plastic bag for when I ship this thing back to China.  Even has a nice little space to affix postage since, apparently, I'm expected to pay for it.  Funny stuff.

Went to leave a 1 star review for the company (because Amazon won't let you give anyone zero), but Amazon gets all cranky if you try to tell the truth about their sellers, and they want you to try to work things out with the seller before you give a bad review.  In the immortal words of Gandhi, fuck that shit.

NEW WORK IN BAD ACID LABORATORIES #4

Excellent photography in this issue.  Very cool stuff.  Find it here:

NEW WORK IN NERVE COWBOY

Another print journal.  Summer 2016, Issue 2016.  Website hasn't been updated recently (as of 10/26, when I last checked), but I assume issues can be ordered there.  They have a facebook page, too...

http://www.nervecowboy.com/

https://www.facebook.com/Nerve-Cowboy-240567569317649/

(art by Naomi Silver)

THE TWILIGHT SAD

Excellent band, love that Scottish burr and that wide-screen angst.  The art just kicks ass, too, especially the mask kid on the early releases......

untitled, 1928 (detail)

this girl on her knees
in the bathroom
and the man she says she loves

the man she lives with
in a different bar in another
part of town with another woman

the way that art is
more violence than beauty

ask dali
as his bed catches fire

ask pollock
as he's thrown from the car

the world only matters
if you can change it

an enemy is someone
you would only fuck for money

and if i tell you
that i believe in christ
then you need to understand
that i also believe in crucifixion

i believe in war
only because i can't stop it

only because there are
33,000 ghosts scaling the walls of
the babi yar ravine

and who was it that invented the
machine gun and why?

look in the mirror

four walls and
a god you'll never see
won't make you safe

keep a weapon beneath your bed
but don't expect it to be enough

remember cobain and his shotgun

remember john geoghan found
strangled to death in
his prison cell

all of the children he molested

will you piss on his grave?

will you consider forgiveness?

and maybe you know the girl
rinsing her mouth out in the sink

maybe you buy her a beer
when she pushes
her way back to the bar

all of our small
desperate actions dragging us
relentlessly towards some
sort of future

NEW WORK IN THE STRAY BRANCH

get it here:

https://www.createspace.com/6583151

VISITATION

LITTLE GLASS PEN

Not updated recently, I don't think, but excellent writing by Amanda Joy:

http://littleglasspen.blogspot.com.au/

(art by Osnat Tzadok)

song

lost the gifts you gave me
then lost the car keys
then lost the phone

sat up until three a.m.
watching the children sleep

knew it wasn’t poetry, but
also knew that
poetry didn’t matter

words pounded into strange
new shapes when the
meaning was what really
mattered, and then
meaning obscured, and then
bitter truths left unsaid

obvious lies held out like
shields to
ward off the darkness
and i am not innocent here,
but i am not ready to
be found guilty

i am not ready to be sewn
up inside the corpse of
the bleeding horse

there is still so much
of my life i need to waste

RECENT PAINTING

Again, the lighting always seems to be off when I photograph these things.  Or maybe the camera.  In any event, the colors in real life are much deeper & darker, w/ more bluegreen mixed in.

Osnat Tzadok

I love her stuff.  She seems to use a lot of the same techniques as me.  In her favor, tho, she seems to know what the hell she's doing.....

and then these sunlit days of obvious joy

or the song you sing w/
yr face smashed in

the blood of christ
collected in a plastic cup

what matters here is that
love is not an ocean

the value of human life has
become negligible when set
against the value of oil or
gold and what we consider
are the reasons how

what we contemplate is why

and there are always more
children to replace the ones
who starve to death to
replace the ones who are
raped who are butchered by
soldiers and by priests and
there is always more wealth
to be stolen and more
wars to be won

takes some serious fucking
pain to keep you up and
running in the land
of the free

THE MEANING ESCAPES ME, BUT I LIKE IT

PHYSICAL HUMOR, NOW IN SIGN FORM!